Persons may accumulate a variety of paper documents such as store receipts, restaurant receipts, coupons, advertisements, automobile repair estimates, and medical lab reports. These documents may be stored collectively, or sorted and stored in categories, or just thrown out. In any event, the handling of the paper documents can be a burden. Organizing the documents can be time consuming. Retrieving the documents to obtain information contained to therein can be tedious; one problem being that a person generally has to be at the location of the document to retrieve it.
Paper documents can be digitized, i.e., scanned, at various levels of sophistication to facilitate document and information management. Once paper documents are scanned, the resulting document images can easily be stored, arranged in computer directories, electronically copied and communicated. Herein, “computer” encompasses devices and systems in which processors manipulate physically encoded data in accordance with physically encoded instructions, wherein the data and instructions are stored in computer-readable storage media. However, the scanning and other steps to organize documents can be burdensome.
Some vendors provide an option for electronic receipts to be sent by email. Email receipts can obviate the need for scanning, but there is still a problem of manually spelling out the email id at the Point of Sale on a device or on the paper form, and organizing receipts from a single vendor, let alone from multiple vendors. What is needed is a more convenient system for sharing the consumer id with the vendors and storing, organizing, and analyzing receipts and other documents that vendors may provide to a customer or other document consumer.